Mexico City, Mexico, Aug 12, 2010 / 11:59 am
The Supreme Court of the Mexican state of Guanajuato rejected claims by the feminist organization Centro Las Libres that six women convicted of killing their newborn infants were imprisoned for illegal abortions. The judges explained that the babies were “born alive” before “their mothers deprived them of life.”
According to the newspaper El Universal, four of the justices told reporters that the six women “sentenced to three decades in prison, are guilty of the crime of homicide,” not abortion. “They added that the “children were born alive, breathed, and their mothers deprived them of life.”
“Judge Alfonso Fragoso Gutierrez said that in each of the six cases, medical examinations showed that ‘the baby was alive and that there was an action on the part of the mother that provoked death’,” the newspaper reported.
One of the babies “was thrown into a toilet and left to die, and others were asphyxiated by obstruction of their respiratory airways.”
Chief Justice Raquel Barajas Monjaras rejected any likelihood that the cases would be re-opened but said an analysis by the United Nations could possibly be permitted.